A - Aureli - Tattara - 2015 - Production Reproduction Housing Beyond The Family

10/2/2019 Harvard Design Magazine: Production/Reproduction: Housing beyond the Family
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No. 41 / Family Planning

ESSAY
Production/Reproduction: Housing beyond the
Family
Pier Vittorio Aureli, Martino Tattara
file:///Users/valeria/Documents/doutoramento/Readings%20/to%20read/A_%20Aureli_Mattare_Production_Reproduction_%20Housing%20beyond%20the%20Family.htm 1/15
Dogma, axonometry of a transformed office park in Zellik, Belgium, 2015.
In The Human Condition, Hannah Arendt distinguishes labor from work.1 While
she identifies work as the production of lasting objects (a table, a chair, but also a
poem or a painting), labor is defined as the sheer, unending business of
reproduction: eating sleeping preparing meals giving birth raising kids cleaning
reproduction: eating, sleeping, preparing meals, giving birth, raising kids, cleaning,
Harvard Design Magazine Current Issue etc. If work leaves behind things that may outlive human existence, labor is destined
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to immediate dissipation for the sake of reproduction. Following Aristotle and the
reality of the ancient Greek polis, Arendt locates the archetypal place of labor in the
house. Unlike public space, which is the space of politics, the house is the place of
oikonomia, or the management of the household.2
Beyond simply offering refuge, the goal of the house has always been to create the
possibility of frictionless cohabitation in which people can reproduce themselves.
This is why the subject of the house becomes the family. The term “family” comes
from the Latin familia, which means servile. The house is thus a congregation of
famuli, of servile persons whose lives are dedicated to reproduction. If in the ancient
oikos these persons were women and slaves, in modern times the servile subjectivity
of the house survives in the many forms of domestic labor that are still needed in
order to maintain the household. Unlike the medieval house where domestic space
and the workplace were often combined within the same building, modern housing
is conceived as a space disconnected from the world of production and completely
focused on reproduction. This condition has contributed to the ideology that sees the
house as a safe haven sealed off from the world of production. In doing so the
household has always rendered reproduction unimportant within the wider spectrum
of production.3 Yet within the rise of capitalism, the reproduction of life becomes
the most essential form of production. This is what Michel Foucault defines as
biopolitics—namely the governance of life as such, and therefore the very goal of
modern politics. Yet as Paolo Virno has argued, the goal of biopolitics is not to
govern life per se, but to govern life in order to create an exploitable laboring
population.4
If labor power—that is, a population’s potential to produce—was and is the most
important form of “production,” the most central productive space is the house
itself.
In order for the state and capital to manage the population, the creation of typical
spatial conditions became crucial. This is why the discourse on typology emerges as
an important site of architectural theory Typology which is tightly linked to the
an important site of architectural theory. Typology, which is tightly linked to the
Harvard Design Magazine Current Issue development of modern housing, has sought to make the house a frictionless space
in which each subject—mother, father, and child—is clearly individuated. Within
this idea, each room of the house acquires a specialized function and corresponds to
a family member or to a specific moment within daily family routine. If the
medieval house was a loose conglomerate of rooms with no strong functional
identity, the modern house developed as a composition of specific spaces such as the
“bedroom,” the “bathroom,” the “living room,” and the “kitchen.” These rooms are
organized as one coherent organism by the corridor—a space that both unites and
keeps separate the differentiated parts of the house.5 Since the 14th century, the link
between housing and its subjects has been reinforced by the condition of private
property, of which the house itself is a clear embodiment.6 In this way, to inhabit a
house means to accept the conditions of both being a family and entering the
economic regime of private property either as a homeowner or as a tenant.
It is not by chance that the majority of housing forms the bedrock of the nuclear
family, which both the state and capital consider a docile and productive subject.
This condition was radicalized in the 20th century by the welfare state, which made
the family the basic unit of societal reproduction. It was later exacerbated by the
neoliberal economic policies; when in the 1980s welfare started to be drastically cut,
the family became the cornerstone of socalled costfree welfare.7 Yet today the
family is often used as an ideological blanket that hides the structural changes that
society undergoes. The overlapping of production and reproduction so typical of the
postindustrial economy is at odds with the frictionless domesticity of family living,
revealing the house, once more, as a place where reproduction and production
coalesce. The house today is no longer a safe haven disconnected from the
promiscuous world of production.
The current domestic landscape is characterized by an increasing gap between, on
the one hand, temporary dwellers, freelance workers, and single parents producing
new forms of cohabiting, and on the other hand, the reassuring and often celebrated
clichés of traditional family life. The current housing crisis thus is not only a crisis
of scarcity and affordability, but also a crisis of subjectivization; family living is
both ideologically supported and de facto challenged by the current economy. This
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Harvard Design Magazine: Production/Reproduction: Housing beyond the Family
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Harvard Design Magazine Current Issue crisis is thus a unique call for a radical reinvention of the idea of housing that rejects
the hegemony of the family (and private property) as the only way to live together.
Coliving and coworking can be more than temporary solutions driven by
necessity; they can also offer longterm conditions inspired by a sense of
togetherness and solidarity. If the evolution of housing has been driven by the
necessity to contain families, an alternative can be proposed only by challenging the
boundaries of housing as containment in both physical and economic terms. Instead
of being organized as an autonomous unit, housing must be conceived as a
composition of equal private spaces organized in relation to shared collective
spaces. Instead of being the quintessential symbol of private property, the house can
be rethought as a system of collective property. One possibility for such reinvention
of housing is offered by the large quantity of vacant office space today in major
European cities.
Office/Housing
In Europe and elsewhere, the rise of freelance work and microcompanies has
ushered in a decline of the traditional corporate workplace. No longer defined by the
9to5 workday, freelance work transcends the traditional separation between living
and working. This is why office space today is being increasingly “domesticized”
through domestic furniture and functions, such as living rooms and large kitchens,
with the goal to conceal the workaholic ethos of postFordist production. Ironically,
the domesticization of the workplace is concomitant with the precarization of work.
Increasingly, work is defined less by the wage system, and more by servile—unpaid
—laboring activities, in which typical domestic duties such as care, affectivity, and
Dogma, proposal for the
transformation of an office block, management become the model for production in general. To thus transform the
Brussels, Belgium, 2014. office into housing is controversial as it may simply confirm the tendency of the
domesticization of work. In order to avoid this ideological trap, the transformation
of office space into housing should not be conceived as a form of domesticization,
but as the possibility of making explicit in spatial terms the productive role of
housing. It is for this reason that we believe that instead of rejecting the generic
office plan, we must embrace it as a timely model for housing itself.
Harvard Design Magazine Current Issue Architecturally, the office plan offers a generic building layout. Typically organized

as unobstructed space with a minimum number of vertical supports and vertical
circulation and clustered services, the office plan can easily be adapted to any use
and occupation. In his essay “Typical Plan,” Rem Koolhaas celebrated the
conventional office plan as zerodegree architecture “stripped of all traces of
uniqueness and specificity.”8 With its radical abstraction, the “typical plan”
transformation of an office block, approximates and gives spatial form to what Marx understood as the most generic
Brussels, Belgium, 2014. faculty of the human being: the potential to produce. Marx did not distinguish work
from labor. For Marx, labor coincided with the entirety of human subjectivity: labor
as the aggregate of mental and physical capabilities to produce.9 For this reason, to
transform office into housing is not only an act of recycling an increasingly
underused typology, but a possibility of giving tangible and spatial form to the
contemporary condition of labor in which work, domestic labor, socialization, rest,
and exchange are understood no longer as separate spheres but as part of the same
productive stream.
To repurpose office space for dwelling space means to take advantage of the
abstraction of the office plan toward the invention of alternative housing
configurations. While in the apartment building, load bearing structure is often
combined with the walls that separate rooms, in the office building, load bearing
structure is usually independent from partitions. Within the office building it is
therefore easier to organize a more flexible collective and shared mode of living
both in social and economic terms. While many municipalities view the dramatic
loss of value of traditional office buildings as an economic problem, such loss is on
the contrary an opportunity for cooperatives and communities to acquire generous
amounts of space at low prices.
Collective/Individual
Due to Brussels’s role as an administrative and political center, which culminated in
2000 when the Belgian capital became the capital of the European Union, the city
has witnessed a dramatic increase of office space over the past 30 years. Today, a
large part of this stock is vacant. Two parts of the city make this crisis especially
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Harvard Design Magazine: Production/Reproduction: Housing beyond the Family
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Harvard Design Magazine Current Issue visible: Quartier Léopold, just east of the inner ring road, where almost all the major
EU administrative buildings and associated organizations are located, and the office
parks located in proximity to the international airport of Zaventem. We propose that
these two sites be transformed into live/work spaces. These interventions should be
understood as pilot projects that can be realized in different contexts, following
transformation of an office block, three specific criteria.
Brussels, Belgium, 2014.
The first criterion is that the new housing is organized according to principles
typical of the union or cooperative; inhabitants would take part in a collective
ownership structure. This housing would be withdrawn from the commercial real
estate market; the union prevents commercial takeover by ensuring that the housing
remains a communal property, and that rents remain stable in the event that the
original tenants move out.
The second criterion is the organization of the housing around two spatial
conditions: being alone and being together. Individual space is minimized so that
one person can live in it comfortably, and collective space is increased to contain
those functions usually squeezed into tiny apartments. In this way, domestic labor is
exposed and shared by the collective and thus drastically reduced as an individual
burden.
The third criterion is to rethink the architecture of the finishings, which has a huge
impact on costs in housing. Applying finishings typical of contemporary industrial
buildings drastically reduces construction costs, but also enhances the quality of
spaces by getting rid of redundant details. The goal is to maintain the zerodegree
architecture of the office space. Moreover, industrial materials and solutions like
concrete flooring, wooden partitions, and aluminum frames are easier to clean and
maintain, and will thus reduce the effort required for maintenance.
Quartier Léopold
In the case of the Quartier Léopold, our proposal begins with a survey of the spatial
and administrative conditions of existing office buildings. We propose to intervene
in a molecular way, building by building, by giving priority to those whose
prolonged vacancy has deeply affected their market value and are thus affordable to
purchase. After demolishing all nonloadbearing partitions, “inhabitable walls” are
inserted in the deep sections of the office floor. These walls contain all standard
services: storage, a bathroom, and a bed alcove. The row of inhabitable walls
divides the floor into two parts: a more private realm, dedicated to living activities,
and a more collective realm, dedicated to social and collective activities. In the
middle, each inhabitable wall acts as a pochè space and supports the needs of the
inhabitants. Eventually, the more private segments of the walls can be opened up by
Dogma, typical plan for the
transformation of an office block, the inhabitants and shared. Rather than being a sequence of rigidly separated spaces,
Brussels, Belgium, 2014. housing becomes a sequence of spaces where being alone or together can be
negotiated constantly by the inhabitants.

On an urban scale this intervention tackles the transformation of an entire
neighborhood block. The inner courtyard is completely liberated from the
extensions that have occupied this space over time, and is transformed into an inner
collective space, accessible from the surrounding streets through four entrances (one
for each side). By adding a light steel structure along the inner elevations, a
continuous system of balconies grants accessibility to each floor of all the buildings,
becoming itself an adaptable meeting or gathering place. Within each block, small
and decaying buildings are demolished and replaced by slim, high towers. These
towers offer large storage spaces on the first levels and host a dense system of
temporary living units on the higher floors.
Office Parks
In the case of the transformation of office parks located in the outskirts of Brussels
and other major Flemish cities, our proposal responds to the estimation that by 2030
Flanders will need 300,000 new houses. Given that the region is already largely
urbanized, office parks offer the possibility for densification. Rather than a single
project, we propose a set of actions that range from the transformation of single
office buildings to the retrofitting of an entire park with the construction of new
housing units in between existing office buildings.
The office park can be considered the most emblematic form of “pastoral
transformation of an office park,
capitalism” that attempted to conceal the pressure of labor within the reassuring
Brussels, Belgium, 2015. image of green landscape. While the office park was considered an attractive
workplace in postwar suburban America, its import to Europe, beginning in the late
1970s, has been less successful. Rather than being developed by corporations, office
parks in Europe are often initiated by developers as rentable spaces. Frequent
turnover of tenants has made European office parks the utmost generic workplace.
Often located on the outskirts of cities, they are always strategically connected to
major infrastructures. It is precisely the generic character of these workplaces that
makes them transformable. In the case of one single building, we propose to first
demolish the nonloadbearing walls and the facade. Once the building is stripped of
its facade and partitions, a circulation ring is added around the building, on which
inhabitable cells are attached. In this way the interior of the office building can be
freely organized according to different necessities. The abundance of space that can
Dogma, plan for the transformation of be found in office parks can benefit material forms of production that require a
an office park in Zaventem, Belgium, certain amount of square meters that are often not available within the dense fabric
2015.
of city centers. Houses can thus be built within office parks either along their
perimeters or even within the “parks” themselves, which often consist of abundant
and underutilized parking lots. These houses can be conceived as flexible
compositions of rooms that can be united into bigger units or remain independent
cells. These rooms are no longer “domestic spaces,” but generic inhabitable spaces
that can be used as a both houses or workplaces. The principle of “equal rooms” that
can eventually be connected to form larger units is a way to counter the functional
and gender specificity of domestic space, and to make housing adaptable for forms
of life beyond the family. For this reason we aim toward a nontypological housing
system in which space is reduced to the bare simplicity of the room, while services
are contained within walls.

While attempting to give form to new ways of living beyond the family, these
projects aim to make visible a tendency that is already evident within the city where
we live and work. These projects do not postulate the end of the family, but question
the traditional nuclear family as the only reference for permanent housing. Being
critical of the microapartment, which tends to miniaturize the functions of the
traditional unit at a very high cost, and of the startup incubator, which, in spite of
its fancy atmosphere, functions as traditional rentable office space, we aim to
imagine spaces that are withdrawn from present real estate logics and where
inhabitants are able to decide, day by day, how to live and work within them.
These alternative forms of living necessitate spatial conditions that promote living
together not as a temporary solution, but as a permanent and desirable condition—to
define an idea of “political visibility” by means of a recognizable architectural form.
There is a risk, however, in proposing typologies where “living” and “working” can
unfold in the same space. This scenario represents the complete fulfillment of a
condition that already exists in which labor is the totality of human existence and
where there is no space and time left free from the “fate” of productivity. Yet a
space that does not separate production and reproduction not only makes evident the
crucial political role (in spite of Arendt’s and Aristotle’s depoliticization of the
oikos) of reproduction within production, but also allows inhabitants to reorganize
both production and reproduction in a way that can free their time. By countering
the fragmentation of domestic space and its atomization into “family houses,”
architecture can support a scenario in which it is possible to share and thus minimize
the burden of domestic labor, but also make possible the self organization of
working activities by cooperation and mutual help, for example by sharing cleaning,
cooking, but also childcare. Moreover, living and working in the same space means
to drastically reduce commuting time and may allow dwellers to more easily limit
work time and reclaim time beyond both production and reproduction. Above all,
trying to reunite spaces for living and working as one space where sharing and
solidarity is spatially allowed may counter the fundamental logic of our capitalistic
society that is the disciplining of housing as a place that makes “natural” the
reproduction of life. Opening up the home beyond the nuclear family living habitus
means to challenge the dwelling habits that for centuries have hidden the role of the
reproduction from political discussions. The central questions to be put on the
political stage are therefore, how can we live together in a scenario where domestic
labor is shared by all and thus reduced to a minimum, and how we can challenge the
paternalistic role of the nuclear family and develop forms of life beyond it? These
questions cannot be answered by architecture alone. Yet by establishing a more open
spatial framework that makes imaginable and possible living together beyond the
nuclear family frame, our projects aim to repoliticize domestic space as a truly
public sphere where different forms of life are no longer enclosed by the individual
home but can be openly confronted, discussed and reorganized.
1. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 79–135.
2. See Aristotle, The Politics, trans. T. A. Sinclair (London: Penguin, 1981).
3. The ideology of the household as a space in which reproduction becomes natural and thus
exploitable for free was radically challenged by the feminist movement and especially by the wages
for housework movement. See Silvia Federici, Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and
Primitive Accumulation (Brooklyn, NY: Autonomedia, 2004).
4. In his book A Grammar of the Multitude, Virno polemically address Foucault’s concept of
biopolitics. Virno argues:
Capitalists are interested in the life of the worker, in the body of the worker, only for an indirect
reason: this life, this body, are what contains the faculty, the potential, the dynamis. The living body
becomes an object to be governed not for its intrinsic value, but because it is the substratum of what
really matters: labor-power as the aggregate of the most diverse human faculties (the potential for
speaking, for thinking, for remembering, for acting, etc.). Life lies at the center of politics when the
prize to be won is immaterial (and in itself non-present) labor-power. For this reason, and this
reason alone, it is legitimate to talk about “bio-politics.” The living body which is a concern of the
administrative apparatus of the State, is the tangible sign of a yet unrealized potential, the
semblance of labor not yet objectified; as Marx says eloquently, of “labor as subjectivity[,]” [t]he
potential for working, bought and sold just like another commodity, is labor not yet objectified, “labor
as subjectivity.” One could say that while money is the universal representation of the value of
exchange—or rather of the exchangeability itself of products—life, instead, takes the place of the
productive potential, of the invisible dynamis.
Paolo Virno, A Grammar of the Multitude, trans. Isabella Bertoletti, James Cascaito, and Andrea
Casson (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2004), 82–83.
5. See Robin Evans, “Figures, Doors and Passages,” in Translations from Drawing to Building and
Other Essays (London: Architectural Association, 2003), 70–79.
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6. See Friedrick Engels, TheAbout BuyFamily, Private Property and the State (London: Penguin,
Origin of the
2010).
7. See Marianne N. Bloch et al., eds., Governing Children, Families and Education: Restructuring
the Welfare State (London: Palgrave MacMillan, 2003).
8. Rem Koolhaas, “Typical Plan,” in S,M,L,XL, O.M.A., Rem Koolhaas, and Bruce Mau (New York:
Monacelli Press, 1995), 335.
9. Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, vol. 1, trans. Ben Fowkes and David
Frenbach (London: Penguin, 1990), 270.
Pier Vittorio Aureli teaches at the Architectural Association School of Architecture in London and is
Visiting Professor at Yale University. He has authored many essays and books, including The
Project of Autonomy (2008) and The Possibility of an Absolute Architecture (2011). Aureli is
cofounder of Dogma.
Martino Tattara is the head of research and teaching at Studio Basel: Contemporary City Institute at
ETH Zurich. His main theoretical interest is the relationship between architecture and large-scale
urban design. Tattara is cofounder of Dogma.
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10/2/2019 Harvard Design Magazine: Production/Reproduction: Housing beyond the Family

No. 41 / Family Planning

Dogma, axonometry of a transformed ofﬁce park in Zellik, Belgium, 2015.

Harvard Design Magazine Current Issue Architecturally, the office plan offers a generic building layout. Typically organized

2. See Aristotle, The Politics, trans. T. A. Sinclair (London: Penguin, 1981).

Harvard Design Magazine Current Issue Browse Back Issues

Labor Brussels Hannah Arendt Collectivity

Other Articles From

Soft Architecture From the Old Family—to the New

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